It appears that misc/hfsplus has been in the tree since 2002, and as there is no $MAINTAINER, it is supported via the ports@ mailing list. Over the years, there have been perhaps three or four conversations about it in the ports@ archives.

You want a clue, daemonfowl? You assumed that mount(8) would work. OK. It did not work. But, when it failed, you forgot to do two very important things before posting this thread.

You did not read the mount(8) man page where it describes how the -t option works, to find out why it failed.

You did not look at the programs installed with the package.

If you had done these two things, you would not have needed to start this thread. Because you would have learned why mount(8) failed, and you would have found the tools you needed to use to gain access to the filesystem.

Hi all and thank you very much for your helpful posts specially jggimi with his great methodological hints

I don't have the hfsplus disk with me now .. but will try things in the evening ..
I remember dmesg doesn't show any errors .. disklabel -e sd0 shew two partitions : c and i ..
pkg_info -L hfsplus informs about a certain hpmount ..

I'm glad you're glad ! :-)
It's an old disk . dating back to when I used to use MacOs X .. it contains data I want to get back before formatting .. of course there are alternatives (gnu-linux mount hfsplus and windows has macdrive etc) but I'm concerned about the OpenBSD way and because OpenBSD is ............. .......... .......
KOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
:-)

You do have an "i" partition. Why don't you try mounting that one, instead?

The "c" partition in OpenBSD is not a partition. It is "the entire drive". That starts with sector #0, where the MBR is, and runs to the last sector of the drive. I will guess that if the software can be handed the entire drive to "mount" -- it may need to be told which MBR partition to use.

You might need to use "raw" device nodes rather than block mode device nodes.

I've done something you haven't, daemonfowl. I used www.google.com with two keywords: hpmount and openbsd.

The first hit was a ports@ discussion from 2007. In it, I learned that you are supposed to use "-r" for read/only, and a mount point. The mount point is missing in your later tests, and you have never used "-r" which I believe should be a requirement. The pkg_info output you posted does not show a man page for the hpmount command ... but apparenlty one was written since this version was ported 11 years ago. Again, I discovered this using Google, and again it was the top hit on the page. The keywords I used were hpmount and hfsplus.

If it were me, I would never ever ever ever not even once attempt to use this without -r.

If both raw (character) and cooked (block) device nodes for the "i" partition failed, I would experiment with the -pn options and the special partition letter that is used for the whole physical disk. I wonder if you remember which letter that is?

And, using that partition of the whole disk, I would experiment with both raw and cooked nodes.

I will tell you that in looking through the ports@ and ppc@ mailing lists, and doing other Internet searches, I have not seen any postings published that showed a successful hpmount command. But it must have been possible, at least in 2002, else this would never have been added to the ports tree